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Companies will not automatically, dollar for dollar, increase taxable wages to compensate for cost increases passed on to employees. That doesn't occur now when businesses are forced to pass increased health-care costs to its workforce.

Whether race relations have actually worsened or whether that perception stems from more information reaching more people, it is obvious that we must re-dedicate ourselves and our government to eliminating injustice and promoting equality.

On June 25, 2015 the Supreme Court upheld President Obama's hotly debated Affordable Care Act in a 6-3 decision. For those following the debate intently, it is understood that the verdict now authorizes federal tax credits for eligible Americans living in states with their own exchanges and also those in the 34 states with federal marketplaces.

As part of a pledge to protect the middle class, Hillary Clinton is taking a second look at aspects of the ACA that hurt working men and women. That's good news, and the only responsible position for politicians interested in providing more and better healthcare at lower cost.

When the CEOs of Aetna and Humana announced a few days ago that they had agreed to a deal in which Aetna will pay $37 billion for Louisville-based Humana, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky pointed the finger of blame straight at Obamacare.

The Supreme Court's recent blessing of Obamacare has precipitated a rush among the nation's biggest health insurers to consolidate into two or three behemoths. The result will be good for their shareholders and executives, but bad for the rest of us -- who will pay through the nose for the health insurance we need.

In the words of the Chief Justice Roberts in the majority opinion in the case, "Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them." Those words could not be more true.

In King v. Burwell, decided last Thursday, the Supreme Court has once again (no doubt inadvertently) given us a lesson in the philosophy of language. The dispute in the case is over the meaning of the phrase "exchange established by the state." Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, argues that the phrase can and should be read to include an exchange established by the federal government. He explains that "exchange established by the state" is ambiguous because when read in context (as he proceeds to do) it means something different than it does when read in isolation. Justice Scalia retorts that by the logic of such a reading, "everything is ambiguous." That's both right and not right.

For the first time since they've polled people on the Affordable Care Act, more Americans like Obamacare than dislike it. And an overwhelming majority of citizens like the tax subsidies. Most feel the law works but could be improved with changes. The change they want is different from what opponents are talking about, however.

Traditional Medicare has proven its superiority over any private, market-based alternatives for the last 50 years. It is time to build on this social insurance model as the health care debate continues.

You might think that we learned the lesson of discredited managed care in the 1990s. The term "managed care" is confusing to many, but really amounts to managed reimbursement rather than managed care, whereby a set prospective annual payment is made by federal/state governments, as in the case of Medicaid managed care (MMC), to cover whatever services patients will receive over the coming year.